We first draw attention to the circular
inviting you to the next Jenkin Meeting. The Jenkin Lecturer on 1 October
will be John F Coates OBE, who was the naval architect behind the remarkable
reconstruction of a Greek trireme, the 170-oared ramming warship of 2500 years
ago. The Greeks optimised their design by trial and error over a century or
so. John did not have that luxury - there was money to build ONE. Come and
hear whether he got it right. And there is a dinner in Somerville the evening
before.

In this issue, apart from the usual news items, we have articles by
Alistair Borthwick on the unhappy state of the Yellow River in China, which
most of the time barely makes it to the sea; Paul Newman on mobile robots
which, like 18/19th century explorers, find their own way around and make a
map while doing so; and Paul Taylor on John Wallis's 17th century design for
building a flat roof out of timbers barely long enough to reach 30% of the way
across (working out the forces had Wallis solving 25 simultaneous equations).
The fourth-year project mentioned by Paul was reported on in the first issue
of SOUE News.

Almost stop-press was the death of Ewan Corlett, widely acclaimed for his
part in bringing Brunel's Great Britain back from a sandbank in the Falklands
and in the restoration of this classic ship in Bristol, where all can see her.
An interesting coincidence is that he and our Jenkin Lecturer overlapped at
Queen's in the 1940s, and both went in for naval architecture.

We draw your attention to the note at the end, asking for contributions to
SOUE News from members outside the Department.